Library involvement in the publishing landscape

By judging from some of the session themes and on-going conversations picked up at the LIBER 2015 conference in London, UK last week, it is evident that library involvement in the publishing landscape is a hot topic.

Stockholm University Press (SUP) and the new model for library publishing

SUP was represented with a paper during the session “New Models for Libraries” where we elaborated the strategy for starting and developing our press as an infrastructure and network. The presentation can be found here.

The aim of the activities described is to link the general strategy of the library to act as a facilitator of information services to and from Stockholm University by supporting the shift towards Open Access with the help of the new university press structure. The aim to drive further academic development is supported by extensive tools for metrics to evaluate the researcher’s efforts in relation to the publishing process.

The support we provide consists of the technical infrastructure for editors to handle a quality-assured and transparent review process, but also put emphasis on good practices for evaluation of research output by the guidelines we develop together with our editorial boards.

Dissemination of Open Access monographs

The Director of OAPEN Foundation, Mr Eelco Ferwerda was presenting their work under the same session theme. He talked about the importance of publishing Open Access monographs with quality-checked peer-review and how to integrate their directory into other publishing services on a global scale.

Research Data Communities in Germany

The third presentation within the same session came from Karlheinz Pappenberger from University of Konstanz who presented the results from a large study about a German e-science initiative, where they found that 50% of the researchers participating in this study felt that they had interesting data to share, but did not share it as open access.

Open Access in the Humanities

Further related content during the conference was for example the plenary session by Martin Paul Eve about OA in the humanities in relation to his work with Open Library of Humanities (OLH). He discussed the problematic relation between APC:s and research funding from different sources.

He stated that the traditional publishing brands rather contributed with an aura of quality to the published work instead of actual quality measures. Eves abstract can be found here. SUP belongs to the same network of university presses as OLH, and this collaboration is likely to give some synergy effects in terms of wider networks and sharing of best practices.

An overview of the conference activities can easily be tracked with the #liber2015 tag on Twitter, or via @LIBERconference.